We speak a lot about the importance of paying attention to what you do to stop yourself from feeling what you’re authentically feeling. Suppressing our feelings takes a lot of energy and creates the potential for both explosions and muted states. For all of our talking about feelings, many of our clients ask, "how do I feel my feelings?" Here’s the frustrating part, "how to" is actually an obstacle to feeling our feelings. When we try to figure out "how to" feel, we only get in our own way.
Feeling what you feel is natural; we just do lots of stuff that gets in the way. It’s just like with hearing, unless you do something to block your ears it’s going to happen (assuming you have the ability to hear). Imagine someone coming to you with cotton stuffed in their ears asking you what they can do in order to improve their hearing. You wouldn’t teach them how to hear, you would simply point out the cotton in their ears and leave the rest to them. When it comes to feelings, the cotton is our resistance, likely in the form of fear. Just like removing the cotton, once we stop ourselves from suppressing our feelings, feeling comes naturally. There is nothing we need to do to feel.
What our work is often about is growing your awareness of the ways in which you stop feeling your feelings. Once you identify that and stop doing those things, you will naturally begin to feel your feelings as they occur, without resistance. The challenge is to apply the work to the right part of the equation (the cotton, not the ability to hear).
Can you identify any of the ways that you resist or suppress feeling your feelings?
To growing your awareness
